Cédric Girard-Buttoz learns the language of chimps (he's an evolutionary biologist)

When he was six years old, Cédric wanted to be Tarzan, following monkeys around the forest and studying their behavior.

He has pretty much made his dream come true. Cédric Girard-Buttoz has researched lemurs in Madagascar, macaques in Indonesia, and chimpanzees at the Taï Chimpanzee Project in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, and he has also studied bonobos and great apes. He is an evolutionary biologist at ENES, the bioacoustics research lab at the University of Saint-Etienne, France. With then-graduate student Tatiana Bortolato and others, he published a fascinating new study showing how chimps combine their calls into messages with many more meanings than we ever thought possible. 

Hear him describe what it's like to live in a rainforest for months at a time (he has spent many hours folding leaves into fly traps), how it feels to finally return home, and what philosophical questions he is trying to answer.

Find Cédric and his research institutions on Bluesky:

@tozbu.bsky.social (Cédric Girard-Buttoz)

@cnrsbiologie.bsky.social (Biological section of the French National Research Institut, CNRS)

@mpicbs.bsky.social (Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science)

@taichimpproject.bsky.social (Taï Chimpanzee Project)

@romanwittig.bsky.social (Taï field site manager, co-author on the study)